The first millers, almost exclusively women, kneel on the ground, scrubbing one stone against another, the naked wheat between them crushed into meal. The marrow of men. And the woman who grinds it stretches her body long, ankles deformed by her work, her belly in the dirt like the cursed serpent who began her misery so long ago.
Wild Rise closes at three. I lock the door and flip the sign. Gretchen cashes out the register and we pack the unsold bread—fourteen loaves today—into paper sacks bearing the Bread of Life ministry logo. Those go into a large plastic trash bag. Someone from First Baptist will pick them up early tomorrow and distribute them to those in need.
We both go to the kitchen. Tee is there, simmering tomorrow’s soups. She always makes them a day ahead because, according to her, the flavors need at least twenty-four hours to marry.
I hadn’t wanted food served at my bakery. To me, bread is bread. There’s a purity to it, a dense completeness that nourishes all on its own. A food that began as an accident. Perhaps a bowl of ground barley and water left too long in the afternoon sun, baked flat and chewy. A portable food, and with the domestication of grain, a convenience food, made at home, without the effort required of hunting game or gathering fruits. Bread built the first cities, established cultures, drew people into community. It was buried with Pharaohs and dug from the ashes of Mount Vesuvius, perfectly petrified loaves, gray and hard as stone. It survives.
Those credentials don’t need a side dish.
But three weeks after I opened, Tee showed up with her tiny John Lennon spectacles and short cropped hair and declared in her Ukrainian accent, “You need soup.”
“Pardon me?”
“I have some. You try.” She opened the basket she carried and gave me a warm container. “Try. Try.”
I uncovered the paper carton and blew on the steaming liquid. Then I took a sip. The subtle sting of cumin and mellowness of sweet potato coated my throat as it slid to my stomach. I closed my eyes and exhaled an involuntary sigh.
“Ah, good. You see. We serve it in a little baby boule.” She indicated the size with her cupped hands. “Everyone will love, eh?”
So I hired her.
“What’s on the menu for tomorrow?” I ask.
“Celery root soup with bacon and green apple. And bean and Swiss chard.”
“Why don’t you ever do something normal, like chicken noodle?” Gretchen asks.
“If you want that, buy a can,” Tee says, stirring the creamy goodness in her speckled enamelware pot.
Gretchen begins preparing for the morning. I hover, watching, though by now she knows what to do. She’ll make the dough for the soup boules, challah, sticky buns, and Friday’s featured sandwich loaf, cinnamon raisin. I start the poolish—a pre-fermented dough—for my own seven-grain Rustica as she weighs the flour and fills the stand mixer. The machine wheezes, rocking a little too much, as it spins the ingredients together. It’s old and will need to be replaced soon. Vintage, Gretchen calls it. My early morning bakery help, Xavier, calls it a piece of junk.
I can feel when the dough has been kneaded enough. But Gretchen, still unsure, stops the mixer and pulls out a small piece. She stretches it, holding it toward the light, and a perfect thin membrane appears. The gluten window. It’s beautiful, milky, the late afternoon light caught in the elastic strands of protein.
“Looks good,” I say.
“Thanks.”
We work without speaking, only the sounds of the machines, the pot lid, the cooler door opening and closing. Some days one of us remembers to switch on the radio, but not today. At four Tee goes home. Gretchen’s shift lasts another hour and her day is finished as well. But she stays longer, as she sometimes does, telling me about the graduate class she’s taking online, about what a total bummer it is to still be living with her parents at twenty-four, and about her plans to go to the movies with friends tomorrow night. Then she says, “You’ve seen that Bake-Off show, right? The one with Jonathan Scott?”
“Yeah, a few minutes here and there.” I’m distracted, reading my notes, following a checklist even after three years in business. I still fear forgetting a step, or an entire bread. Each tick of the box is a pinprick in my billowing anxiety, releasing it so I won’t explode. Baguette dough next. Flour, salt, and yeast first.
“Do you like it?”
I shrug, thermometer in a bowl of water. Perfect at 40 degrees Fahrenheit. I add it to the flour mixture. “It’s fine, I guess.”
“Have you ever thought about being on it?”
“No,” I say with a snort. “Why would I?”
“I don’t know,” Gretchen says, and then runs her hand over her mouth while continuing to speak, mashing her words back against her lips.
I stop. “What?”
“I said, promise not to fire me.”
“You didn’t.”
“I did.”
“Gretchen, what in the world were you thinking?”
She throws her hands up. “I don’t know. I was watching a few weeks ago and there was this lady on, baking these rather anemic bagels, all pale and puffy and misshapen, and I was like, ‘Liesl could do so much better than that!’ So I checked out the website, and all I had to do was fill out a form and attach a couple photos and, well . . . tell me you’re not too angry.”
“Don’t worry. Do you know how many bakeries probably apply to be on that show? There’s little to no chance they’ll pick us. So you’re safe.” I smirk. “But if Jonathan Scott does come calling, then I’ll fire you.”
Gretchen laughs with me. “I’d gladly be fired for a chance to meet him. Even you can’t help but notice how stinking good looking he is.”
“Get out of here. I don’t pay overtime.”
Quiet now, alone, I add wood to the oven, a blend of oak and cherry. It will burn all night, until Xavier comes at three a.m. to extinguish it, enough heat held in the bricks to bake all morning. On the proofing table, four troughs of dough wait for me. They’re for my wild yeast breads—sourdoughs—and I let no one work with them but me. The starter I use is more than eighty years old, cultured by my grandmother and brought from Germany when she came here, widowed, her nine-year-old daughter in tow. Even when I wasn’t baking—running from the memory of bread, of my mother, of the warm, brown scent I associated with everything I’d lost in my life—I still kept that starter in a jar in the back of my refrigerator and fed it. Sometimes not as often as I should; once half a year passed before I unscrewed the lid and mixed fresh flour in with the pungent, yeasty slime it had become. And there was a time when I needed to leave it in foster care for an extended period. But I always came back to it, and it always resurrected, those not-quite-animal, not-quite-plant organisms waking to feed again. So I covet this part of the bread making, each loaf imprinted with a bit of my mother’s soul.
I shape the dough, all of these boules. The plain Wild Rise sourdough, though nothing about it can be considered plain—it’s simply unadorned to spotlight the complex flavors—is left to proof in bannetons, the coiled willow of the basket leaving its distinctive pattern on the crust even after baking. The dark, earthy Farmhouse miche is freestanding boule, nearly four pounds, formed and left on linen couches. I chop ripe pears and knead those into the third dough, along with cardamom and fresh ginger, to make the Spiced Anjou. Tomorrow I’ll add a candied pear slice to the top, to bake into the crust—Xavier’s idea. And finally the Sweet Chèvre, with its sharp goat cheese and fig filling.
It’s nearly nine. Some dough goes into the cooler. Some I cover with plastic wrap and leave on the table. Then I go upstairs to the apartment above the bakehouse, eat an apple and shower, and set my alarm for four thirty in the morning.
Two
They bake together, my mother and grandmother, performing the dance of brot without hesitation, their bodies confident with a sense of space I’ll never have. I watch, not because they don’t want to include me, but because I’m fascinated by their movements. Even from behind, their kinship is clea
r. They share a shape—open hips, thick legs, narrow shoulders—Oma’s body the shorter and more compact of the two, like a shadow when the sun is just beyond noon. Their hair is the same brown, shimmery with the undertones of fire, Oma’s with streaks of soot gray where her youth has burned away. When I draw them up into my mind, it’s always their backs I see first, and I must will them to turn around to remember their faces.
I look nothing like them.
I’m all points to their curves, nose, chin, elbows, ribs. I ask about it, and my mother tells me I favor Daddy’s side. Later we sit together and flip through a photo album, the plastic pages squawking, and she touches the face of a black-and-white woman with pale hair, long cheeks, and downturned eyes. Your father’s Aunt Elinor. She’s plain and pointy and never married. I have to admit I resemble her more than not, and wonder if that’s how they see me, the pointy girl destined to become an even thornier spinster.
Oma takes me on her lap and tells me of Germany, good Lutheran tales because my father is Irish and Catholic and she believes I learn nothing of the things I should. She tickles my armpits and whispers other stories from Der Struwwelpeter. My mother tries to intervene but she’s shushed and waved away. Du machst aus einer Mücke einen Elefanten!, Oma tells her, gravel in her voice. You’re making an elephant out of a mosquito. But my mother knows I’ll have nightmares of thumb-sucking boys with sheared-off fingers and a giant Santa Claus drowning me in ink.
But then Oma tells me of bread, of the six hundred kinds made throughout her homeland, white and gray and black in color. Loaves heavy with pumpkin seeds. Pumpernickel. Rye. All with long, dense names like Sonnenblumenkernbrot and Roggenmischbrot. Each word is music to her. She has never eaten tinned bread bagged in plastic with a little twist tie, a pride she wears all over. It matters, she tells me. Wes Brot ich ess, des Lied ich sing.
Whose bread I eat, his song I sing.
I come into the bakeshop at five in the morning, a film of coffee and toothpaste on my tongue. Xavier, as steady as time, loads bread into the oven with a long-handled peel. The first loaves of the day. The rest proof on the tables, one final rise, one last chance for the Saccharomycetales to feast before entering the fiery furnace. They aren’t the first domesticated creatures to be sacrificed for the stomachs of their masters, but perhaps the only ones to have their immortality stolen from them. As individuals, yeasts eventually die, but the colony can live forever, mother cells budding daughter cells into eternity.
Xavier wears swimming trunks and a sleeveless tank shirt, the heat from the oven washing over his skin. Perspiration shines on his bald head and catches in the hair of his long, fibrous arms. I recall the photos I’ve seen of Parisian boulangers, clad only in thin, white cotton shorts, baker’s lames in their teeth.
“’Morning, Zave,” I say.
He nods. “I sliced and sugared the pears for you.”
“I would have done it.”
“I know,” he says, and then motions to the tables. “Beautiful work.”
I would love him, I think, if he were forty years younger, or I forty older. He once hugged a still-warm miche to his chest, pressed his cheek to it when he thought no one would see him, and right then I read our kindredness on his face. I understand now why some believe in reincarnation, two people learning one another over and over into infinity, retaining pieces in the persistence of memory so they will recognize something of the other when they meet again. Xavier peers through me like glass.
My first instinct when seeing the domes of yellow-white dough is, always, to put my hands on it. The taut skin of unbaked bread, the puffiness pressed up just beneath the surface. It’s a woman’s stomach, swollen with maturity, beautiful in its generosity. As a child I would poke my finger into it, deeper and deeper until the dough no longer sprung back but created a divot in the otherwise perfect mound. “Look, Mama, a belly button.”
“They’re scars,” she’d tell me. “Everyone begins life with a scar.”
She knew.
And now Xavier scores the dough and it opens in gaping, bloodless wounds. The crust will bake differently in those places—rougher, thinner, blistery. More scars.
This is my body, broken for you.
When Wild Rise first opened, I did all the bread making myself. I brought Gretchen on when it became clear I couldn’t keep up with the demand and thought she would make the things I didn’t like to do—the enriched breads, the sandwich loaves, cinnamon buns, breadsticks. For five months I woke at two a.m., shuffling downstairs with the grit of sleep in my eyes. I fell into bed by eight, though by the time the lunch crowd left I dreamt of curling beneath the blankets. But the quality of the bread suffered. I had to hire someone, and after several weeks of help-wanted advertisements in the local classified section of the Green Mountain Sentinel, and several applicants I wouldn’t trust to pour a bowl of cornflakes, let alone work in my bakehouse, I found Xavier. Or he found me. He’d owned a bakery in New Hampshire, started in the seventies and built to three locations, his bread in supermarkets across the state. He retired here, to Vermont, and gave the business to his children, but the lure of dough can’t be buried with golf games and winters in Tampa. “I’m seventy-one,” he told me when I mentioned the ungodly hours. “I don’t sleep anyway.”
Three years later, I still couldn’t guess his age if I did not know it.
We pull loaves from the oven, Xavier shoveling them onto the peel, me catching them in the baskets and setting them on the racks. The air snaps with cooling crust, a symphony of dried twigs crunching beneath my feet, of cracking knuckles, of Rice Krispies. I’m home within that sound.
I keep notations, like my mother. She had notebook after notebook of trials and errors, all written in her perfect penmanship on quad-ruled pages, a square for each letter to nest in. My journal is a thick black hardcover with unlined pages. Like her, I’m a technician, a statistician, copiously documenting slight variations in texture, color, taste. I’m a chemist. A quarter cup of rye flour added to the white wheat gives a sweeter flavor. A half teaspoon more salt and 78 percent hydration of the dough result in those coveted large, irregular rooms in the crumb. Mastering formulas, not recipes, in the quest for the perfect loaf. Xavier tells me not to bother. He doesn’t believe in perfection. “Forget the ingredients. Forget the environment. You are different each day. You can’t replicate yourself. Your hands are stronger, or weaker. Your mind thinks different thoughts while kneading. Life is all over you, changing you. All that goes into the making comes out in the bread. It won’t be the same from one batch to the next. Not ever.”
“It’ll be close, though.”
“Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.”
He’s the artist. He makes me brave enough to try. With his encouragement, I’ve focused on the creativity of bread, writing my own recipes, exploring nontraditional flavors and shapes. Not all of them turn out well, but he tastes my failures with me, with layers of warm butter.
Xavier fills the oven again. I scrawl a few notations in the corner of my journal while his back is turned, twist a pencil into my hair, and after adding cinnamon and star anise to the bowl, plunge my hands into the wet flour mixture. Pans clatter, and I see him stirring brown sugar on the stove. The sauce for the sticky buns. “I would have taken care of that,” I say.
“I know,” he says. “But your hands are a mess.”
“Tee’s gonna throw a fit when she finds out you used her pots.”
“Only if someone tells her.”
I laugh. “I don’t have to. She’ll know anyway. She has some sort of psychic chef sense.”
“We’ll see about that. I’ll turn the handle to point exactly where she left it.”
“Wager on it?”
“Oh, I’m not a betting man,” he says, and winks because we both know I’m right and he’ll lose.
Yes, kindred.
Liesl’s Orange Chai Boule
Makes one loaf
LIESL’S NOTES :
This bread uses commercial yeast, but it’s an excellent introduction to cold fermentation, a way to extract more flavor from the bread by slowing the fermentation process. It’s delicious toasted with cream cheese for a little bit of sweetness.
INGREDIENTS :
360g (3 cups) unbleached bread flour, organic if possible
6g (1 teaspoon) finely ground sea salt
5g (1 teaspoon) instant yeast
120g (½ cup) fresh-squeezed orange juice
140g (½ cup) plus 2 tablespoons cold water
10g (1 teaspoon) orange zest
½ teaspoon ground star anise
½ teaspoon ground fennel seed
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
¼ teaspoon ground allspice
⅛ teaspoon ground cardamom
85g (¼ cup) honey
EQUIPMENT :
mixing bowl
wooden spoon
stand mixer with dough hook (optional)
olive oil or nonstick cooking spray
glass or ceramic bowl
cornmeal
pizza peel or parchment paper
plastic wrap
broiler pan
pizza stone or baking tiles
serrated knife or razor
baking thermometer (optional)
DO AHEAD
Combine all of the ingredients in a mixing bowl. Use a large wooden spoon and stir for 1 minute, until well blended; the dough should form a coarse, shaggy ball.
If using an electric stand mixer, switch to the dough hook and mix on medium-low speed for 2 minutes. The dough should stick to the bottom of the bowl but not to the sides. Or knead by hand for about 2 minutes, adjusting with flour or water as needed. The dough should be smooth and soft but not sticky.
Use olive oil to lightly coat the inside of a clean bowl. Transfer the dough to this bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate overnight or up to 4 days.
Stones for Bread Page 2